Description:

1st Printing. Signed. 366 pages. Published in 2010. The author's second book on music. One of the most important musical events of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Alex Ross' "Listen To This". A rich collection of essays on music. Except for one magisterial piece that Ross wrote just for the book, all of the essays previously appeared in The New Yorker Magazine, have been slightly or significantly revised where appropriate, and are thereby the author's final versions. "Utilizes a wide musical scale: Classical music in China; opera as popular art; sketches of Schubert, Bjork, Kiki, and Herb, as a way of understanding the world. Ross offers timeless portraits that probe the ways that the powerful personalities of composers and musicians stamp an inherently abstract medium so that certain notes, songs, or choruses become instantly recognizable as the work of a certain artist. The virtuoso performance comes in the one previously unpublished essay, 'Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues', where Ross isolates three different bass lines as they wind through music history from the 16th-century chacona, a dance that promised the upending of the social order, through the laments of Bach, opera, and finally the blues" (Publishers Weekly). "Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Teaches us how to listen more closely" (Publisher's blurb). Alex Ross is one of the most intelligent and insightful living writers on music. His mastery of the English language is worth noting as much as his encyclopedic knowledge of music. Just as his dazzling debut, "The Rest Is Noise", is best read and enjoyed as though it were a novel, his innate sense of narrative allows us to read his new collection as though it were a short story collection. Currently the Resident Music Critic of The New Yorker Magazine, Alex Ross succeeded not one but two of the greatest music critics we shall ever read: Andrew Porter and Paul Griffiths, both Brits. His essays are among the reasons The New Yorker Magazine remains not only relevant but indispensable reading, nothing less than one of contemporary life's most civilized pleasures. An absolute "must-have" title for Alex Ross collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen on the title page by Alex Ross. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of very few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A scarce signed copy thus. Winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. One of the finest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ALEX ROSS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0374187746. Bookseller Inventory # 15881

About this title:

Alex Ross?s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Rossas one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essayin which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music,showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popularartists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublishedessay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of musichistory?from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin?through a fewiconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketchescanonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; givesus in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björkand Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newarkhigh school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.

Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

About the Author&colon;

ALEX ROSS has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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